Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search
Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we’ve spotted but not blogged
separately:
From The SEW Blog…
Shakespeare Searched By Clusty
If it’s September it must be Shakespeare. Clusty has released Shakespeare
Searched which is designed to provide quick access to the works of the Bard.
It’s not designed as a replacement for, or access to the full text of his
work, but as a quick reference resource. The concept is that it can be used to
identify who made a specific speech, which work contains which quotes or even
individual words, and also helps draw out specific themes in individual works
or across the entire corpus. It doesn’t provide analysis or commentary, just
direct access to the text via Vivisimo….
The Ten
Linking Commandments By LinkMoses
Eric Ward posted a fun but true list of what he calls LinkMoses Linking
Commandments. But honestly, number five makes me wonder about practicing what
you preach. 🙂 Come on LinkMoses, “Thou shall not refereth to content as link
bait, any more than you shall refereth to your users as carp.” Nice list!…
Search
Bugs At Yahoo & Google
In the past twenty-four hours I have discovered and documented four different
bugs or weird occurrences at both Yahoo and Google. I will cover the four
bugs, include adult ads displaying in Google and Yahoo’s contextual programs,
Yahoo’s contextual ads not displaying ads at all, Google’s site operator not
functioning properly and Google’s AdWords statistics not showing the right
data….
Big
Brands: Do You Know What Wikipedia Saying About You Via Google?
Steve Rubel produced a small study on the top 100 advertisers, according to
AdAge, to see where in the Google rankings, does the brand’s Wikipedia entry
fall. For example, a search on the well-known automobile brand Chevrolet shows
a Wikipedia entry for them at the number four result. What that Wikipedia
entry says about your company, can have a huge impact on your brand. The study
showed that the Wikipedia entry listed in the Google results for the top 100
brands, on average was at position 11. But Steve Rubel explains that many of
those brands have listings within the…
The
Search Diggs
I love the idea of trying to combine something like Digg with search news and
have been wanted to do this myself for ages. Maybe I still will, but others
have gotten there first. John Battelle is the latest with SearchMob having
just launched today. Head over there, and you can submit and vote on stories
related to search. Search N Sniff is a similar site that launched last week,
and The Search Engine Press is the oldest, launched in February….
Windows
Live Local Better, But Still Not There
Windows Live Local (WLL) came out of beta today along with Live.com and Live
Search. Chris Sherman covered the full upgrade and release in his Search Day
article. This post will focus on WLL specifically. Derrick Connell,
Microsoft’s search business general manager, is quoted as saying that 15% to
20% of search queries are local. (While this estimate may be slighly low, it
would mean somewhere between 975 million and 1.3 billion U.S. search queries
per month (across all engines) had a local intent. This shows what’s at stake
in having a good user experience and being able to monetize…
Windows
Live Search Enhanced
Microsoft has pushed Windows Live Search out of beta, enhancing a number of
features and adding some seriously cool functionality to other services, as
well. More on the new tools in today’s SearchDay article, Microsoft Upgrades
Live Search Offerings….
Google
Interesting Items Module: Recommend Searches, Pages & Gadgets
Google has added an Interesting items for you module to the personalized home
page interface as noted in the Google Operating System blog. Google works with
your own searches and attempts to find other things that will be of interest
to you. The module provides users with three tabbed options – searches, pages
and gadgets. I found that the searches Google suggested to be something of a
mixed bag; some of them were actually quite sensible, although they were
limited to a maximum of three individual search terms (not a phrase search in
sight) – out of the 10 recommendations…
Track
Federal Spending With Government Search Engine
Andy Beal spotted an AP article named Senate backs online search of spending.
Yes, the Senate wants to make it easier for normal users to track what the US
Government is spending taxpayers money on. The example search given is that,
“one could type in “Boeing” to find contracts awarded to the aerospace company
or “breast cancer research” to see efforts to battle one of the leading
killers of women.” Andy asks, why not just have Google do it for the
government, since they already know a lot more than the government does
anyway? :)…
Google’s
Toolbar Anti-Phishing Blacklist
Philipp Lenssen reports on a whitelist of URLs found at sb.google.com which
appears to be a whitelist of safe URLs to be used for the Google Toolbar. Be
digging deeper into the forums area of Google Blogoscoped, you can see that
the this whitelist will prevent the “Web Forgery” warning in the Google
Toolbar from popping up on those particular sites….
Google
GeoTargeted AdWords Preview Tool: See How Ads Look Outside Your Region
Friday, the Inside AdWords blog announced a new feature that allows
advertisers to see how their ads appear. So if you want to test the appearance
of your ad locally or based on a specific set of geographic criteria, you can.
Go to www.google.com/adpreview and type in your keyword phrase. If you want to
add geo-specific criteria, you can. To define the country enter &gl=[Two
Letter Country Code Here], to define the region enter &gr=[region code here],
you can also define city, latitude and longitude, postal code and DMA. More
details at the AdWords Help Center….
Looking
Back At Search & 9/11
Five years ago, like so many, I was shocked and horrified by the events of
September 11. I spent the day uncertain of what to do, before running for the
cover of what I knew, looking at the search engines. Finding Disaster Coverage
At Search Engines illustrates how they reacted that day. It underscored what
I’ve long described as the great failure of Google then, having to effectively
tell people to go elsewhere for information while its web search results were
showing links with descriptions saying things like “View from the WTCA
Headquarters.” Since that time, the emergence of Google…
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